News Comment/COMENTARI AL DIA

The Spieker of Catalonia/L’SPIEKER DE CATALUNYA

Thomas Spieker enjoys live coverage of the vast party-like Catalan demonstration. Below: Cornelia Derichsweiler reported on 9/11 the day before it happened from over 600 km away.

It is always a pleasure to read Thomas Spieker in Diari de Girona. He nails it (Spieker means nail in German) on German anti-Catalanism. Are Germans more Spanish nationalists than Madrid? Thomas Spieker certainly not. Germans are no worse than other Europeans. It won’t be Frankfurt, or Madrid, who will decide but Catalans.

Thomas Spieker writes: ”I never understood why so many Germans are so determined to become the indestructible bulwarks of Spanish unity. I know several German journalists who treat the question of independence as their personal battle taking sides with the most reactionary press of Madrid’s Neanderthal media instead of observing the events with enough detachment and informing on what is really going on with some degree of objectivity. Leo Wieland, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung correspondent in “Der katalanische Weg” is a typical case of how to jumble information, manipulation and opinion to make fun as the protest of a couple of hotheads one of the largest and most peaceful demonstrations ever seen in the European continent. It’s not even necessary to go as far as Madrid to finds German Catalan-phobia. On the Costa Brava in Empuriabrava a certain Angelika Eisenführ holds non-stop sway as a pseudo-journalist barefaced and systematically lying in her articles to fulminate against the wishes of the majority of these people. She herself has become the news item with pronouncements like “Catalan is a codified regional dialect.” NZZ, the great newspaper that I read in Zurich, used to have a correspondent who simply reproduced the PP press release. So that the new correspondent, Cornelia Derichsweiler, from Frankfurt and talking head of the main German public television channel, looks like an improvement by simply relaying what Madrid newspapers say. Her articles are just as poor on Catalonia as on the banking crisis. The Madrid high speed train takes two hours to reach Catalonia, but she never bothers to turn up. Once she did come…to interview a realtor selling homes to Russians! Not exactly the first choice to inform on Catalonia. For the 9/11 demonstration she modestly reported on the events the day before! Lots of predictions and nothing about what really happened the next day! But German television now talks of Barça as a Catalan team. Not so long ago they were merely “Spanish.”

(L’Spieker de Catalunya,” by Josep C. Vergés, Diari de Girona, 5 October 2013)